CHICAGO—Chicago’s 6-5 overtime win in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final was enlivening and series-tying. But it also had to count as alarming. Five times the Bruins beat Blackhawks goaltender Corey Crawford. All five times they beat him to the glove side. Of the 12 goals the Bruins have scored in the final, eight have gone in past Crawford’s trapper.

The locational lopsidedness raised more than a few questions. For one: Is 30-year-old Ray Emery, the Blackhawks backup, stretched and ready to go? Chicago coach Joel Quenneville, calling Crawford “the biggest reason why we’re here today,” said on Thursday he is not considering a goaltending change.

And then there’s this: How can an NHL goaltender who is two wins away from a Stanley Cup possess such an obvious vulnerability?

“(The glove hand) is one of the weaknesses in North American goaltending that not a lot of people are addressing today,” said Jukka Ropponen, one of the top goaltending coaches in Finland.

Ropponen, to throw out a warning, has a strong point of view that may offend Canadian traditionalists. And certainly there are those who’ll say he’s unfairly biased. Crawford’s counterpart in the final, of course, is a Finn named Tuukka Rask. Ropponen, who counts among his pupils Niklas Backstrom of the Minnesota Wild, acknowledged that he is acquainted with Rask, although he said he has never had the opportunity to coach him.

Still, Canada is in the midst of what amounts to a goaltending crisis. Less than a year away from the Sochi Olympics, the country is bereft of an obvious national No. 1. And the game’s overseers are concerned enough about the lack of netminding prospects that they recently invoked a ban of foreign-born goalies in the Canadian Hockey League.

So perhaps it’s a good time to listen to the perspective of one of the pioneers of the successful Finnish developmental system. Of the 29 NHL goaltenders who played 24 or more games during the 48-game regular season, six were Finnish. That’s about 21 per cent of NHL regulars coming from a country with less than 4 per cent of the world’s registered players. Canada only produced nine goaltenders who played 24 or more NHL games this year. That’s 31 per cent of NHL regulars from the home and native land of 38 per cent of the world’s registered players. In other words, if Canadians are slightly underrepresented in NHL nets, Finns are grossly overachieving.

Ropponen traced the root of that success back about 20 years, when he was among a group of hockey men who sketched out a developmental model for young goalers. Their research and analysis told them many things — among them that Finnish goaltenders needed to control the puck better. To do this, Ropponen said, it was decided they would develop a national coaching standard that stressed the importance of playing with the goalie’s hands out in front of the body — a marked difference to a popular North American style.

“If you look at the Quebec style, Francois Allaire and these guys, they just want to have every hole blocked and they want the hands tied close to the body — basically you’re blocking the puck versus controlling the puck,” said Ropponen. “The Finnish style — and the Swedes are following this path, too — from a young age we put a lot of emphasis on catching the puck and controlling the puck. We believe the more we bring the hands out front, the more we’re catching the puck, the better we’re seeing the puck and controlling the puck, and we’re covering more space.”

For viewers of the Stanley Cup final, this helps explain why, on the other end of the ice, Rask continually displays an ability to snag speeding rubber like an all-star shortstop gobbles liners. Ropponen isn’t alone in spotting the trend. Certainly Maple Leaf fans have bemoaned the lack of glove-hand prowess of James Reimer, Toronto’s Allaire-influenced goaltender. Larry Sadler, a GTA-based goalie coach who believes in the merits of the Finnish style, said Reimer’s blocking technique was a direct contributor to Toronto’s Game 7 collapse to Boston in the opening round of the post-season. Controlling the puck means controlling rebounds —one of Reimer’s Game 7 downfalls.

Frantz Jean, the goalie coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning, spent four years coaching the Montreal-bred Crawford with the Moncton Wildcats of the Quebec junior league. He said he never considered Crawford’s glove hand a problem. Jean said Crawford needs to “adjust his positioning” to take away the hole the Bruins are exploiting.

“He’s a smart guy and he’ll figure it out,” Jean said.

Still, Jean, who has studied under Allaire and Vladislav Tretiak, acknowledged he is seeing more young North American goaltenders who aren’t particularly adept with their catching hands. He said coaching could be a factor, as is a lack of all-round athleticism.

“The big part in Europe, why guys are using their hands more effectively, is that growing up, they play a lot more sports,” Jean said. “I’ve got my goalie schools in the summer, and I notice the young kids, they’re playing hockey 12 months a year. There’s not a lot of baseball, tennis, squash. And so kids in North America don’t develop that eye-hand co-ordination.”

There are other goalie experts, like Jean, who believe Crawford will be able to address Game 4’s lessons with a quick tweak. Quenneville said the team “will visit with” those technicalities before Game 5. Steve McKichan, the former Leafs goalie coach, said Crawford should make “an incremental glove adjustment” — specifically, move the glove a little higher to give shooters less of a look at the mesh.

“For me, I’ve loved how Crawford’s played in the playoffs,” said McKichan. “He has a little hiccup right now. But I don’t think it’s a molehill that needs to be made into a mountain.”

Ropponen is far less convinced the Blackhawks can win the Cup with Crawford making clumsy stabs at incoming shots.

“The Bruins know (Crawford’s) weaknesses,” Ropponen said. “When he goes down in the butterfly, he drops his hands even more. Seriously, as a head coach, I would be looking at putting Emery in the next game. Because Crawford, technically, he is not sound.”

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